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Much movie-watching to start the new year! I consider this to be a good omen. Of course, much movie-watching has also resulted because I've finished watching Season 4 of Supernatural, woe is me, and will have to possess my soul in patience (as befits the subject matter) until Season 5 finishes and gets its (cute) butt onto DVD. Season 4 was ... dark. Very dark and angsty, and featured angsty boys being dingbats and being led around by the nose by both angels and demons while apocalypse lowered. Given how absolutely steeped in Christian mythology the whole series is, I'm surprised I'm enjoying it as much as I am. On the other hand, the writers really are throwing their hats into the ring on the whole "Judao-Christian notions of God lack all sense or logic" issue, which is probably helping.

Anyway. This weekend I watched two movies: Brick, on DVD last night, about which I say wow, and Sherlock Holmes on circuit this morning, about which I say yay.

Brick is, when you get down to it, a completely bizarre little film: high-school drama told in the noir idiom. It's a bloody clever, beautifully shot and scripted, well-cast and well-acted project driven by an entirely original and individual vision. It's actually uncanny how well the incredibly recognisable tropes of the noir thriller slide onto the high school setting, like a grimy glove onto a grimy fist. You know, for a start, not to trust any of the women, who are either femmes fatales or, basically, victims and dead. There's also both an inevitability and a curious dislocation in realising that the main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is a damn fine actor and whose 500 Days of Summer I really must see this week) is simultaneously a smart-arse high school kid and a hardboiled detective - the slightly grim, wearily competent, basically ruthless and soiled paladin of Hammett or Chandler. The seamy underworld is perhaps a bit unrealistic, high school kids dealing in hard drugs and hard knocks, but the occasionally very funny intrusion of school-kid reality, together with the emblematic treatment of character and landscape, are compelling and easily overcome any logical disconnects.

Above all I found the writing, particularly the kids' use of language, to be superbly realised - clipped, enigmatic, rapid-fire noir slang, much of it early-20th-century and extremely dated, becomes teen patois without batting an eyelid. I was pretty much blown away by this film - intense, intelligent, slightly indescribable viewing that demands a lot from its audience but repays that input magnificently.

Sherlock Holmes was bloody good fun, and not quite in the way I expected. I must cop to being a drooling RDJ fangirl, but actually the actor is beautifully submerged in the character here, far more so than in Iron Man, which I think mined the actor's personality far more than this did. I have to applaud Guy Ritchie for making something rather more than simply another tired trotting-out of the Holmes tropes: this film dances off the screen with its own energetic vision, simultaneously remaining amazingly true to the spirit of the Conan Doyle stories while imbuing them with its own iconoclastic life. I thought the women were a bit weak, but Jude Law does a more than creditable job, becoming likeable in a way he hasn't for a while, and Holmes himself (as one expects from RDJ) was spot-on. Reading between Conan Doyle's lines, the great detective always was an impossible man, quite likely bi-polar as well as obsessive, driven, antisocial and unstable as all get-out, but also vulnerable despite his near-infallible intellect.

I didn't find the action elements at all out of place, although they are obviously exaggerated beyond the slightly repressive Victorian intellectualism of the originals. And visually the film is stunning, not just clever Ritchie action choreography, but a truly grimy, dark and threatening Victorian London with absolutely no idealistic gloss. (Look out for the beautiful pen-and-inks of the closing credits). Mostly, I think I enjoyed the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, their well-delineated old-married-couple bickering particularly (my subject line from a Jude Law quote, incidentally, seen amusingly here). I was also incredibly happy that the film's heavy dose of occultic hokum resolved itself in the true Baskerville-hound fashion; anything less would have struck a horribly wrong note. Like Brick, this is definitely one for the DVD collection.

This week: Avatar! alias Thundersmurfs!. And probably 500 Days of Summer, just to show the world that I do too have a brain.

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 04:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com
It will be interesting to see what you have to say about Avatar. Do you get the D3 version over there?

Did you notice that at one point in Sherlock Holmes, Jude Law calls RDJ "Old cock"?

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 05:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com
I did indeed notice, my slashy senses were tingling. Actually, contraction of "old gamecock", as in fighting rooster, circa eighteenth century. But out of context, amusing :>.

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 09:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com
Yep, I got the fighting cock thing. Um.

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 05:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com
and, yes, 3D Avatar definitely; unfortunately there are only two 3D cinemas in Cape Town, and they've both been booked solid since the film opened. We're going to try for Thursday.

Date: Tuesday, 5 January 2010 08:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] khoi-boi.livejournal.com
3, actually, if you can stand Nu Metro Canal Walk's plush seats, balconies and ample elbow-room.

Date: Tuesday, 5 January 2010 08:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com
Canal Walk is where we saw Coraline, so I can definitely stand all of the above; I just find that they sometimes tend to put their sound up way too high for action movies. My ears hurt.

But yes, I stand corrected. Three, not two. We do have a booking for Thursday. And, now that I check, it's at Canal Walk. This comment feels all circular and pointless.

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 04:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] grumpyolddog.livejournal.com
Holmes leaps to unpunished conclusions. I annoyed the whole cinema at one point by muttering "Oh yeah? And uncle/nephew is impossible how?" during one particularly blatant example.

Then again, ACD's Holmes always did so too, which annoyed me just as much then. If you can process information quickly, try not to be sloppy about it.

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 05:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com
Ah, but at one point he was punished for his leap with a face full of wine.

Date: Monday, 4 January 2010 05:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com
Near-divinatory levels of insight about his environment are basically Holmes's superpower: the important thing is the upshot, not the realism of the process. IIRC there's a lovely bit of Albert Campion, or possibly Lord Peter, in which the detective bitches about how Holmes's insights should really be wrong a lot of the time. As with any superhero, you're supposed to suspend disbelief and go with it. At least it isn't laser vision :>.

Date: Monday, 4 January 2010 12:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] grumpyolddog.livejournal.com
Great. Now you've made me hate him, due to use of the word "insight". When it was just observation and information processing - something that many people do extremely fast - it was fine. "Insight" however, that's some mystical instincty bollocks that I have no time for.

Date: Monday, 4 January 2010 01:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com
I think this is about semantics, actually. As far as I'm concerned "insight" = observation + analysis: as a lit professional, if I'm offering you insight about a text I'd better damned well be able to back it up with evidence, otherwise I'm just blathering, mystically or not.

And what else is "instinct", in the human sense, other than extremely fast observation and information processing on an unconscious level? I don't believe in mystical bollocks either.

Please don't hate Holmes more because of my vocab choice! - I agree that his process of observation + analysis doesn't hold water a lot of the time in either book or film, but he's a pretty endearing and compelling literary construction despite being basically unrealistic.

The Pin

Date: Sunday, 3 January 2010 10:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pinkthulhu.livejournal.com
Coincidentally, I watched "Brick" again this weekend, after it arrived from my DVD rental place. It's a very fine film, and I'm not just saying this as a huge huge fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (also see "Mysterious Skin" and "The Informant" if you get a chance).

Not seen "Avatar" yet, so would be good to hear your (3D) view.

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